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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Among these three observances, one only, that of the Cistercian Trappists, to which belonged the abbey of which I was a guest, followed in their integrity the rules of the twelfth century, and led the monastic life of Saint Bernard's day.
In April 1554 a royal commission was issued to Dowdall and William Walsh, formerly prior of the Cistercian Abbey of Bective, to remove the clergy who had married from their benefices. In virtue of this commission Browne of Dublin, Staples of Meath, Thomas Lancaster of Kildare, and Travers, who had been intruded into the See of Leighlin, were removed.
Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of Abbey-leix in Queen's county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in Kerry; all three dating from after the reformation of the order by Saint Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent missionary did not apparently extend its influence to Ireland until a later date.
The first abbot, Ranulph, was sent by St. Bernard of Clairvaux himself at the king's special request, and he must have brought with him the plan of the abbey or at least of the church. Nearly all Cistercian churches, which have not been altered, are of two types which resemble each other in being very simple, having no towers and very little ornament of any kind. In the simpler of these forms, the one which prevailed in England, the transept is aisleless, with five or more chapels, usually square, to the east, of which the largest, in the centre, contains the main altar. Such are Fontenay near Monbart and Furness in Lancashire, and even Melrose, though there the church has been rebuilt more or less on the old plan but with a wealth of detail and size of window quite foreign to the original rule. In the other, a more complex type, the transept may have a western aisle, and instead of a plain square chancel there is an apse with surrounding aisle and beyond it a series of four-sided chapels. Pontigny, famous for the shelter it gave to Thomas-
A Cistercian monastery, which had been chiefly built by the second Giulio, crowned a prominent cliff, which dominated the town, and commanded a view of the whole of the valley of the Edera, and, on the western horizon, of the Leonessa and her tributary mountains and hills.
One Latin rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack: 'These are they who wickedly corrupt the holy psalms: the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner and the over-leaper: Tittivillus collecteth the fragments of these men's words. Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor little devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the story as it is told in The Myroure of Oure Ladye, written for the delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century: 'We read of a holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made; and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke.
I remember that when I made my probation in a Cistercian cloister I had no health, and yet had it been necessary I would have eaten stones! "Moreover, the rule will soon be softened," pursued the abbot; "but in any case there is a country which, if there should be scarcity, assures us a good number of recruits, Holland." And seeing Durtal's look of astonishment, the father said,
King John went into one of his paroxysms of despair at the ruin he beheld, and, feverish with passion, arrived at the Cistercian convent of Swineshead, where he seems to have tried to forget his disaster in a carouse upon peaches and new ale, and in the morning found himself extremely ill; but fancying the monks had poisoned him, he insisted on being carried in a litter to Sleaford, whence the next day he proceeded to Newark, where it became evident that death was at hand.
The friars were not troubled with questions of property: they had none; they depended for their livelihood on the alms of the faithful. Again, speaking generally, one may say that while the Benedictine priory is found under the shadow of a castle, and the Cistercian abbey in the heart of the country, the friaries were built in the slums of the towns.
The Cistercian monks, whose abbey stood there in the thirteenth century, wore no clothes but rough tunics and cowls, and ate no flesh, nor fish, nor eggs. They lay upon straw, and they rose at midnight to mass. They spent the day in labour, reading, and prayer; and over all their lives there fell a silence as of death, for no one spoke.
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